The portal which has about 6,500 listings, charges an online fee of about 2% for customers.Madhav Chanchani | ET Bureau | July 30, 2015, 07:51 IST

He now has big ambitions for Droom. The portal which has about 6,500 listings, charges an online fee of about 2% for customers.Investment firm Lightbox Ventures and Japanese Internet firm Beenos have led an investment round of Rs 100 crore in online automobile marketplace Droom, backing founder Sandeep Aggarwal who is crafting a comeback as an entrepreneur.

Aggarwal, who was charged in an insider trading cases involving one of the world’s largest hedge fund SAC Capital and its billionaire founder billionaire Steve Cohen, had to quit his post as co-founder of online marketplace ShopClues in 2013.

Two years later, Aggarwal has managed to rope in the same set of investors— who backed his first entrepreneurial foray—to provide initial funding for Droom, an online marketplace for selling cars and bikes.

“I was worried about investors reception given my legal case, but I under-estimated the power of track record,” said Aggarwal whose second startup Droom launched in November 2014 has registered fast paced growth with sales touching Rs 13 crore in June.

“At Shopclues we achieved that mark in 20 months,” said the 42-year-old who has a management degree from Washington University.

After pleading guilty for passing non-public information in the insider-trading case, Aggarwal turned witness for the prosecution in the trial. His final fate in the case, where he is now a co-operating witness, is yet to be formally sealed and a hearing is due in the next few months.

Investors, however, are backing the execution ability Aggarwal has displayed at both ventures. After a late start in the online retail sector, Shopclues is now ranked amongst the top five marketplaces in the country.

“There are very few people who have been able to scale up an (online) marketplace beyond $100 million in gross merchandise value (GMV),” said Siddharth Talwar, partner of Lightbox Ventures who was an angel investor in Shopclues. Japan’s Beenos came in as an institutional investor in both Shopclues and Droom as well .

Aggarwal spent over seven years working as an Internet analyst at companies like Citigroup, Oppenheimer, Collins Stewart and Caris & Co before coming back to India in 2011 to startup. But during a family vacation in July 2013 to Disneyland in the US, the former Wall Street analyst realised that he was being charged and that he had to move out of his role at Shopclues.

He now has big ambitions for Droom. The portal which has about 6,500 listings, charges an online fee of about 2% for customers.

Droom takes a small cut out of the 2%, with average selling price on the website pegged at Rs 2 lakh. “We will end fiscal 2016 with Rs 250 crore in GMV and reach Rs 800 1,000 crore by end of FY17,”said Aggarwal.